Jonathan Groff on His New HBO Series Looking, Dressing Up in Leather, and Nintendo

Jonathan Groff followed up on his breakout role in the original cast of Broadway’s Spring Awakening with a guest-starring role on Glee alongside best friend Lea Michele, so at first glance, it may not seem that Looking, his new HBO show that’s widely been called the “gayGirls,” is a huge departure for the 28-year-old actor. But it is. Playing Patrick, a gay man at the center of his group of San Francisco–based friends, Groff has teamed up with Michael Lannan, the show’s creator, and Andrew Haigh (of Weekend) to portray stories that feel poignant and raw, without any gratuitous shock value. In a word, Looking (which debuts this Sunday, January 19) feels real. Groff spoke to Vogue from San Francisco, where he was busy for this week’s West Coast premiere.

I heard that the show was originally set in Brooklyn, but that it was moved to San Francisco to differentiate it from Girls. Is that true?
That’s partly true. Michael [Lannan] lived in San Francisco for a couple of years, and that’s where he originally set it. He relocated it to Brooklyn because that’s where he was living when he made a short—Lorimer, like the subway stop on the L train—that got picked up by HBO. When they were developing it into Looking, they decided to bring it back to San Francisco because it’s unique compared to [HBO’s] other programming. So actually it came right back to where it began.

When did you first hear about the project and when did you get involved?
I first heard about it about a year ago. The big draw was Andrew Haigh, our director. When I heard he was attached, I knew I had to get in the room and work with him because I was so blown away by Weekend. He directed five out of the eight episodes, is one of our executive producers, and was in the writers’ room for the whole first season. I think all of us in every department would agree that Andrew Haigh was our resident genius. It was very settling to have him, because you never know with this stuff . . .

Having someone like that allows you as the actor to trust the project, and to go all-in.
Exactly.

In shows about a very particular demographic like Sex and the City or Girls (not to belabor the comparison), each character often represents a particular subset of that demographic. How representative would you say the characters in Looking are of various types? Or do you think each character is more personal than that?
It’s interesting, because only as we started to do the press circuit have people begun to hold up certain characters to what they supposedly represent in the gay experience. It’s cool and interesting to look at retrospectively for us, but when we were making it we really were just trying to create interesting stories and characters in the city of San Francisco. When we were making it, nobody was saying, “This is representative of this . . .” or, “When we do this, it’s symbolic of that . . . .” We just wanted to create the most interesting and complex characters we could. I actually think that by creating specificity in your work, it makes it more universal in some way.

Right, because it’s more real. I’m wondering—how much did you directly draw on current events during production? I’m thinking of developments in the marriage-equality debate and LGBT legislation in Russia and elsewhere?
We didn’t, really. The only time-sensitive thing that we jumped on was the Folsom Street Fair, which was very carefully placed in our production schedule. We jumped and shot many of the scenes for that episode there. Every year, thousands of people come to display their mostly S&M kinks. It was a total education; we felt very bonded after that experience. It was a pretty intense day for us.

No pun intended! Did anyone, um, dress up?
Well my character is in a leather vest and then, yes, some of the crew did get dressed up! Even some that weren’t working that day came by anyway. So yes, we were in the spirit.

The art direction of the show is very specific, very carefully done. It seems like a studied nonchalance that seems to make sense for Northern California. Where did the conversations about the look of the show start and end?
With the exception of my apartment and my office, we shot everything on location in San Francisco. So every bar, restaurant, street is completely on location. And then Danny Glicker, who was nominated for an Oscar for Milk, and is our costume designer, wanted to create a look that was very San Francisco that had a lot of specificity in its familiarity. He spent weeks walking through the streets and taking pictures of people and what they wore. So the clothing we wear is very specific to both the area and our characters, as well.

You play a video game developer on the show. Are you a gamer?
Not at all. I had to have a tutorial before I left L.A.! My friend Kyle, who’s a big video-game nerd, took me through a bunch of different ones. I played a lot of Nintendo as a kid, though. I loved Super Mario Bros. 1, 2, and 3, and I like Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. I never loved Duck Hunt.

I’m curious as to whether or not, as an actor who is out of the closet, you hesitated to take a role that could typecast you as gay. You’re not Jared Leto.
There were a lot of conversations, as there are when accepting any new job, but the conversations had more to do with the material and commitment of time than they did the “gayness” of it. Typecasting isn’t specific to gay actors, it’s something every actor has to deal with. It’s a Catch-22 because as you become successful, people tend to put you in a box and say, “That’s what you’re allowed to do.” I come from musical theater and then I did Glee, so it takes a lot to prove I can do more than sing and dance and that I can do straight plays, too. No pun intended [laughs]. But I believe in the project so much that being typecast is a risk I’m willing to take.